Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. P. who wrote (17751)	2/24/2004 7:10:40 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

The first thing that comes to mind is that they physically bring the replacements into this country my psychic powers suggest you mean things like foreign workers working in the US. if that is what you mean, i can understand why it is upsetting. but if that were the only problem, it could be dealt with through the Immigration office (foreigner workers on work visas here cannot vote against referendums to ban their visas). the much bigger problem is the work that is being offshored--obviously, you can pay a lot less to an Indian in India than an Indian in the US. as an IT person, you are feeling or observing the early impact of it, but the bigger opportunity is for business process outsourcing--moving entire departments such as Accounting and HR offshore. according to IBM, the potential for offshoring in BPO is 20x as large as for IT (this is an "opportunity" for offshoring consultants, but a "problem" for the workers being made redundant). so increasingly there will be "nowhere to hide" in US jobs. this is already clear from fact that growing industries nationwide have average salaries 21% below those of contracting industries. if i were in the IT field, i would try to become an offshoring consultant now. i think that will be a growing industry as increasingly small enterprises seek to take advantage of labor arbitrage. as businesses offshore, they will need consultants in the US to help them figure out how to do it effectively.

To: J. P. who wrote (17751)	2/24/2004 8:02:39 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

The danger in manufacturing and service industries leaving the country, both lower tech and the higher tech still to come, is not the loss of the immediate jobs - however hard that may be. The real risk is the loss of the business and thus all future jobs related to it. Andy Grove of Intel has discussed this. Many nations do not respect property rights in any form, and others do so only intermittently. China is a glaring example, but India has taken American businesses in the past. There is a lot of fancy talk about the benefits of world trade and those benefits do exist. But off-shoring businesses comes with risks which do not exit in normal world trade. Long lists of Businesses have off-shored plants with the expectation of larger markets and lower costs. Yet the result has repeatedly been a transfer of technology to the off-shore partner which becomes a competitor without compensation for patents or copyrights. Many American business are run by people whose short-term interests are not aligned with their shareholders or their country. This is another area where I admire practices in Australia. Critical and proprietary work is always done in Australia while other work has been off-shored for years. It amazes me that there, in spite of the occasional magazine article, that there is such a low level of recognition of this problem. Maybe it's just due to the naive American trait which always expects the best of others and expects things to always work out for the best - like in the movies. Many would argue that the solution is an emphasis on R&D, but the U.S. increasingly finds R&D an uneconomic pursuit. Not surprising when billions of R&D can be casually and quickly given away to an alleged partner in return for nothing.